Memories Of Stalin May Decide Russia Election

PARIS - — Russia's presidential election could be decided by how voters look back on the brutal epoch of Joseph Stalin that ended nearly a half-century ago.

In the popular mind, recollections of Stalin's murderous rule may be weighed against nostalgia for his reign's power and "orderliness" to determine the outcome of a close contest between President Boris Yeltsin and Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov.

Yeltsin has warned that electing a Communist to lead Russia would mean a return to the worst excesses of the Soviet era and, possibly, civil war.

But Zyuganov plays up what he calls the "glories" of Stalin's achievement in turning a backward state into a global superpower. Portraits of the old tyrant are massively displayed at his election rallies.

"Zyuganov is gambling that older Russians have forgotten the terrible events of the Stalin years and are nostalgic for the supposed stability of that time," said Georges Minc, a Russian specialist at France's National Research Council, a think tank in Paris.

"He is also using Stalin to appeal to the nationalist pride of young Russians who know only vaguely about Stalin's crimes," Minc said.

Onetime senior Soviet official Alexander Yakovlev told a Russian interviewer on Tuesday that 60 million people were shot, starved to death or died of disease in slave labor camps in the 75 years of the Soviet Union's existence, the vast majority of the deaths occurring under Stalin's dictatorship between 1924 and 1953.

Yakovlev's figure is about 10 million higher than most previous estimates of the number of victims of Soviet rule. Yakovlev, who was a key adviser on reform to the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, currently heads the Yeltsin government's Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.

Some historians have calculated that one Soviet citizen in 10 was a victim of Stalin's rule. They say at least 2 million were executed as "enemies of the people" during the Great Terror of the 1930s when he eliminated his rivals inside the Communist Party and anyone even remotely suspected of supporting them. Millions of others died in incredibly harsh conditions in hundreds of labor camps.

Nicholas Chimsky, a Russian-born political analyst, said, "There is hardly a family in Russia today that didn't have a close relative taken away by the secret police, often never to be seen or heard of again."

Chimsky said, for example, that Yeltsin's father and Gorbachev's grandfather were imprisoned for political unreliability during Stalin's time.

Nonetheless, most experts concede that many Russians continue to be strongly fascinated with Stalin. Admiration for him seems to have risen, as the generation that experienced his rule has died off.

But Chimsky stressed it isn't just hazy nostalgia that has led to his revival.

"Throughout history, there has been a strain in our national character that admires, indeed idolizes, leaders who are ruthless and bloodthirsty, as long as they are credited with enhancing Russia's greatness," he said. "It is the Ivan-the-Terrible syndrome."

Ivan IV, a 16th century czar, was known as "the Terrible" because of his savagery. In the 1930s, Stalin ordered a flattering film to be made about him.

Zyuganov is counting on this national trait to help tip the scales in the minds of voters who have grown weary of the economic chaos, social upheaval and crime that many of them complain have dominated Yeltsin's four years as president, Chimsky said.

The Institute for Parliamentary Sociology, seen as Russia's most reliable polling organization, predicted the two leading candidates would each receive 36 percent on the first ballot on June 16. If none of the 11 candidates get a majority, a runoff will be held July 7.